Is Failure to Support Gay Marriage Immoral?

I recall last week that a certain blogger named Justin seemed to think that opposition to same-sex marraige is immoral. I don't recall how they laid out exactly how such opposition is "immoral" or even if he tried to at all, but as with other commenters in the blogosphere, perhaps he thought that just saying that it was just made it so.

Robert Knight's recent article mentions a couple of reasons that may suggest to the average reader, that a case could be made that gay marraige could be viewed as "immoral".

"Utah, which had a Mormon population that advocated polygamous unions, was denied statehood until it passed a law ensuring that only one man, one woman marriages would be legally recognized.

The key case was Murphy v. Ramsey (1885), in which the Supreme Court upheld Congress' right to make polygamy and bigamy illegal in U.S. territories and a requirement for statehood. The court said:

"For certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth, fit to take rank as one of the coordinate states of the Union, than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guarantee of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement."

WORLD magazine culture critic Gene Edward Veith notes that the homosexual drive to gain marital benefits is destroying marriage itself as people abandon commitment and embrace the "gay" notion of serial monogamy with "sex partners": "This sort of reductionism -- a spouse is nothing more than a sex partner, so a sex partner is the same as a spouse -- misses the point of what marriage is and what its role in society amounts to....Marriage is being defined down..."

Hoover Institute research fellow Stanley Kurtz has chronicled the acceleration of societal uncoupling from marriage in Sweden:

"Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock....Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood."

Knight links to a report by the group Mass Resistance which chronicles an extensive list of questionable outcomes since gay marraige was instituted in the state of Massachusetts. Some examples from the list might be debatable insofar as if they're "immoral" or not. However, who among us could possibly argue with the following?

"Since homosexual marriage became “legal” the rates of HIV / AIDS have gone up considerably in Massachusetts. This year public funding to deal with HIV/AIDS has risen by $500,000. As the homosexual lobby group MassEquality wrote to their supporters after successfully persuading the Legislature to spend that money: "With the rate of HIV infections rising dramatically in Massachusetts, it's clear the fight against AIDS is far from over."

Citing “the right to marry” as one of the “important challenges” in a place where “it’s a great time to be gay”, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health helped produce The Little Black Book, Queer in the 21st Century, a hideous work of obscene pornography which was given to kids at Brookline High School on April 30, 2005. Among other things, it gives “tips” to boys on how to perform oral sex on other males, masturbate other males, and how to “safely” have someone urinate on you for sexual pleasure. It also included a directory of bars in Boston where young men meet for anonymous sex.

Given the extreme dysfunctional nature of homosexual relationships, the Massachusetts Legislature has felt the need to spend more money every year to deal with skyrocketing homosexual domestic violence. This year $350,000 was budgeted, up $100,000 from last year."

I don"t mean to throw too much information out there at this time, so I'll stop right there. I believe that a good starting point would be to entertain explanations as to why the opposition to a practice that has seen AIDS cases rise in it's wake, increased domestic violence, increased levels of illegitimacy in countries where it was adopted and has led to questionable subject matter to students that is arguably not age appropriate could in any way be considered "immoral. What are your thoughts on the matter?





And please, I don't want this discussion to devolve into an accusation that those who are not supportive of the idea of gay marraige are trying to keep people who love each other apart from one another. We're talking about the effects of such a sweeping change as it relates to society. For example, what are some of the benefits to a society that redefines monogamous marraige to that of the "notion of serial monogamy "?